Why I’m Not A Novelist

by mathinaz

I am feeling isolated. I feel entirely alone in the bubble that is my job and I hate it.

There is a huge chunk of student life that I’m just in charge of. It’s my business what we do and how it gets done, which is an incredible amount of freedom but also means that no one is doing it with me. The things I work on affect plenty of other people, but no one else is day-to-day doing them. There is no one to process things with when I want to think out loud. There is no one to bounce ideas off of. There is no one to listen when I need to vent and tell me that they empathize. There is no one professionally who cares how my day went. There are other administrators, but they are preoccupied with entirely different aspects of the school. There are teachers, but I’m not supposed to interrupt their busy days and talk through my issues with them. In my job, there’s just me and whichever children make it to my office that day.

In realizing this, my biggest panic is my own professional development. How am I going to get better if there’s no one supervising what I do? How am I going to make better decisions next time if no one talks me through my last tough call? How do I set goals for myself if I’m not getting feedback? How am I supposed to ask for help if there’s no one around to give it? I learned most of what I know about teaching from incessantly showing up in front of other teachers and begging for advice, and that’s all I know how to do. I’ve already got shelves full of reading resources, but I’m not convinced that’s going to do it for me.

My other panic is my sanity. We all know that I just really like to talk (or blog) about things. I need that to be able to think properly, and I don’t function well when no one’s listening. My friends are going to get sick of these run-downs of my day pretty quickly. What do I do if there’s no one I can connect with?

Ms. Math, have I mentioned lately how much I like you? Seeing all your comments made me really happy. And you remind me that this blog was also a huge outlet for me in my first year of teaching. I’m working on my return to blogging with a vengeance